In Illinois we have a complicit, left-wing media establishment that will never write a bad story about Democrats. This deal with 8th District Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth–a candidate for the US Senate, no less–is a perfect example. Duckworth is being accused of punishing two whistleblowers who were trying to uncover Duckworth’s massive mismanagement when she was at the VA and yet the media is practically silent on the story.

Durckworth is now being sued by two whistleblowers who came forward to reveal her complete mismanagement of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs. They are suing because when they tried to bring this info forward, Duckworth retaliated against them and punished them for shining a light on the mismanagement.

Duckworth is currently selling herself as an ideal candidate for the US Senate and will run against the weak spinned Republican Mark Kirk in 2016. One of her claims to fame is her tenure at the Illinois VA where she served as Director Of The Illinois Dept. Of Veterans Affairs between December 15, 2006 and February 6, 2009.

“I Have Been A Very Effective Administrator… I’m Proud Of The Work That I Did At The State Of Illinois Department Of Veteran’s Affairs,” she said on WFLD in April.Read more

Last month I noted that the Illinois state legislature is still pushing yet another tax to bedevil its already over taxed citizenry with the plan to push a tax on satellite TV providers. That plan has not abated.Unfortunately, it is just another example of Illinois burdening it citizens because of the failure of the politicians.

Recently Illinois State Representative Art Turner (D-09) floated the idea of in 2012, but was never signed into law.Read more

The move for school choice is not only growing in Illinois in general but in Chicago in particular as politicians and parents both see the downward spiral of the public education system picking up speed.

With the costs of public education soaring but neither the rates of graduation nor proficiency growing accordingly, parents are desperate to find a way for their children to gain a better education.

The state is pumping millions upon millions into the bottomless pit of education and taxes are edging higher every year to support the spending habit. As an example, Illinois school district U46 (west of Chicago in the Elgin area) has $600 million in bond debt and this is just one of the nearly 700 school districts in Illinois.

So, as the system founders, many experiments have blossomed. We all know that charter schools have grown rapidly in the Chicago area, but there are other schools such as Leo Catholic High School in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood that are serving as perfect examples of school choice. Leo is a prime example of a private high school that is a wildly successful example of education at its finest.

The school is not fully supported financially by the city’s Catholic system but has since 1926 served students as an independent high school operating in what is now one of the city’s most depressed neighborhoods. The school started back when Auburn Gresham was a heavily Irish-Catholic part of the city but now serves an entirely African American student body. (Edit to note: The Archdiocese of Chicago does support Leo and has provided over $2M in direct, financial operating support for the school between 2009 and 2015, but doesn’t pay all the school’s expenses as it does the schools it has direct control over.)

The school has been such a success that for the last six years 100% of its students have been accepted into a college or university and 96 percent have gone on to pursue higher education.Read more

Even as fracking finally came to Illinois, it came at the worst time in the market for oil. This advancement, however, was not made easily. Resistance to the measure was heavy, replete with tough regulations.

In 2013, after then-Governor Pat Quinn signed the bill authorizing fracking, many hoped that the new rules would bring much-needed jobs to a state with one of the worst economies and job climates in the country.

But in recent months the price of oil collapsed, making fracking operations inside the U.S. much less profitable. For Illinois, it has been nearly too late to cash in. Could Illinois have avoided being too late to profit off of fracking?

Things could have gotten off to a better start. The Democrat-led state legislature dragged its feet on regulations and implementation for over a year and a half. By the time regulations were finished, the boom was on the wane….

Adam Andrzejewski has thrown his hat in the ring to become the new Illinois Governor’s pick to replace deceased State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka and I think there isn’t a better, more qualified candidate than Adam.

Patriots In Action recently sent out a letter to supporters urging them to contact Rauner’s transition team to have the incoming governor consider Adam Andrzejewski (And-gee-efski) for the position.

Here is what she sent out…

You may be aware that Adam Andrzejewski has made application for the appointment to the open Illinois Comptroller position.

I realize it is a very busy time of the year, but time is of the essence.

If you would be so kind, to let Governor Elect Bruce Rauner know your thoughts and recommendation.

For quick background, Mike Flynn- a Quincy, IL native and editor at Breibart wrote a great column last week about this.

Please take a few minutes and write an e-mail recommending Adam to this most important financial office in Illinois.

With the passing of Illinois State Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, the state is faced with a bit of a dilemma. How should she be replaced?

After a lifetime of service to the state, Topinka passed away at the age of 70 from the effects of a stroke suffered last week. She was serving her second term as state comptroller to which she was just re-elected this year.

But her passing comes at an inconvenient time for state government as the current governor has only a month to go in his final term and the next governor is from the opposing party.Read more

Transparency, shmansparency. Once again we see a government doing its level best to keep you, the people, from being able to find out what it is that government is doing to you. This time it is in failing Illinois where lawmakers are trying to make it much, much harder to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Yes, your representatives in the Illinois legislature–Republican and Democrat alike–don’t want you to be able to find out what they are doing in Springfield. Imagine that.

The bill (HB 3796) would make it extremely costly to file for an FOI request allowing the government to charge up to $100 per request and would also give the government even more time to fulfill requests for information.Read more

Only days after the 2014 election that gave Illinois a new business-minded, tax-cutting Republican as its new Governor, Illinois State Senator and nominal Republican Dave Syverson gave us all a perfect example of why the Illinois GOP is such a crashing failure when he chirped up that he’d love to make the “temporary” state income tax hike permanent, BEFORE the new Governor even gets a chance to take office.

The 2014 midterm elections were a sharp rebuke to a nation of big spending, big government Democrats that have destroyed state budgets, the American healthcare industry, and engorged government in every corner of the nation. This wave election even affected deep blue Illinois as an insurgent first-time Republican candidate beat a thoroughly entrenched Democrat incumbent.

One of the reasons that new Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner beat Democrat Pat Quinn is because Rauner ran on his outsider status, his business acumen, and his promises to cut taxes and get the state back from the brink of collapse. Rauner promised to change the absolute fact that Illinois is the worst state in the country in every single measure of what makes a successful state.Read more

The Republicans bumped up their gains in the Senate and the House of Representatives and also gained in Governor’s mansions across the nation and even deep, deep blue Illinois was affected by this GOP wave. But even with these few bright spots, Illinois is the worst state in the union on every level.

But, yes, last night there were some bright spots. First of all, two Democrats lost their seats in the House of Representatives.

In the 10th District over in Lake County, Robert Dold re-took the seat he lost in 2012 when Democrat Brad Schneider knocked him out. Schneider rode Obama’s coat tails into the House in the big 2012 Democrat sweep.

Dold endured a vicious campaign full of lies launched by Schneider and the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee. The Democrats claimed Dold was a “Tea Party” extremist and a major anti-abortion activist and neither are true.

But the shocker was the 12th District race where State Rep, Mike Bost just slammed Democrat incumbent Bill Enyart by a wide margin. I don’t think anyone had this major upset on their radar here in Illinois. Enyart only got one term and was ushered into office in 2012 along with the 10th District’s Schneider.

But the biggest upset is the race for Governor in the Land of Lincoln.Read more

In another example of why government unions should all be eliminated, two union operatives in the Illinois school system have been the happy recipients of million-dollar pensions–courtesy of the taxpayers–for teaching classes for only a single day.

Back in 2011 I wrote of union operatives Steven Preckwinkle and David Piccioli at the Illinois teachers union who both “taught” only one day in the Illinois school system and then went on to be union operatives for the rest of their careers that were supposedly in “education.” Yet despite their lack of actually educating anyone, both were still demanding to get huge, generous pensions for being “teachers.”Read more

Illinois is in such bad shape it can’t even produce no littering signs that are properly spelled, it appears.

Friend to the blog John Ruberry of the wonderful MarathonPundit blog was on a trip through the state when he spotted a no littering sign that read: “Please Don,t Liter.”

Apparently the workers in the sign department in the State of Illinois don’t know the difference between a coma and an apostrophe, nor, apparently, what a contraction is. And spelling? What is with this ‘liter’ business? Are Illinois sign makers saying we should not use the metric system here?

Obama’s home state of Illinois is struggling to break the Great Recession. A perfect example of this is seen in a recent report that shows that applications for food stamps in the Land of Lincoln is greater than its creation of jobs.

Illinois has had the worst recovery from the recession of any state in the country, the Illinois Policy Institute reported this month. “There are nearly 300,000 fewer Illinoisans working today than in January 2008, and 170,000 fewer payroll jobs. ”

“For every post-recession job created in Illinois, nearly two people have enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps,” the Institute wrote. “In the recession era, the number of Illinoisans dependent on food stamps has risen by 745,000.”Read more

Obama’s Illinois perennially ranks at the very bottom of every statistic that marks a successful state and a new report on America’s “sinkhole states” finds that Illinois again ranks at the very bottom this time for how much state debt each citizen is saddled with.

The statistics gathered by the excellent Chicago-based budget watchdog group Truth In Accounting calculated how much state debt–obligations like pensions, healthcare plans for retirees, etc–each citizen would have to pay to retire the debt in a lump sum.

Truth In Accounting found that Connecticut is the worst state in the union with each citizens owing 48 thousand dollars per citizen to retire the debt. But coming in a close second is the state of Illinois with a whopping 43 thousand dollars per citizen in debt.Read more

Last weekend Illinois GOP candidate for Governor Bruce Rauner took the ALS “ice bucket challenge.” When he did he urged Illinois Democrat leaders to join him in the challenge. In reply, the state’s Democrat House leader outrageously found a way to link the charitable challenge to a claim that Republicans are like the ISIS terrorists in Iraq!

Instead of picking a long-time politician, Republican voters in the Land of Lincoln chose businessman Rauner as their candidate for Governor and he has been quite a different kind of candidate. I suppose he felt that the ALS challenge was a feels good way to lighten politics up a bit in Illinois–a place where calling politics a “blood sport” is an understatement.

Well, to show that even charities aren’t beyond being used for mean spirited political jabs, the office of Democrat House Speaker Michael Madiagn responded to the ALS challenge by claiming that Rauner would like to hire ISIS terrorists for his campaign.Read more

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has a great idea. He wants Obama to bring all the illegals to Illinois! In a state that sits at the bottom of every metric that makes a successful state–rampant unemployment, lowest job creation, highest debt, biggest pension crisis, worst business climate–Pat Quinn wants to import thousands of people who have no jobs and no prospects for one, people with no education, and people possibly full of diseases right here to the Land of Lincoln.

On Friday evening after the news day was done, Quinn announced that he is prepared to give as many illegals as Obama can spare a place to stay in Illinois.

During the announcement, Quinn spokesman Grant Klintzman said, “If a location is needed we are prepared to aid the federal government in finding a suitable one.”Read more

A new poll of likely Chicago voters seems to find that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in bad shape for his re-election coming up next year. The poll shows that two other candidates are far and away more popular than the incumbent mayor. One of those two is Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, a woman who is nearly an out and proud communist. But, if Chicagoans would vote for Lewis, they don’t deserve the vote at all.

This new Chicago Sun-Times poll shows Emanuel losing–and badly–to two other possible mayoral candidates in next year’s election. The biggest disparity is that between the mayor and Current Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. She really slams Emanuel beating him 55 percent to 31 percent in the poll.

Preckwinkle has made no moves at all to run against Emanuel and insists she won’t. Still, rumors abound that she will throw her hat in the ring, anyway.

To be honest, it really is no surprise that Emanuel is finding low favorables in polling this far out from the election. Mayor Emanuel has failed in many respects as Chicago’s mayor. He has done nothing at all to address the mounting pension crisis, spending is still skyrocketing, he’s solved none of the mess that previous mayor Richie Daley left him, and worse of all violence in the city has soared to never before seen rates of blood shed.Read more

I have been chronicling all the major failures of the once great state of Illinois and this week we have yet another one. A new tabulation of private sector job creation finds that Illinois created a dismal 500 non-government jobs in 2013 making it the single worst state in the Midwest and almost the worst in the country (again).

Illinois has earned its spot as the state with the worst GDP in the entire Midwest. So, once again we find that Illinois turns out to be one of the worst states in the country for nearly any and every metric that makes a successful state.

Michael Lucci of the Illinois Policy Institute pointed out in a recent blog post that Illinois ranks only above Missouri as the worst for GDP growth among the 12 Midwestern states in the survey.

“Illinois recorded the second-worst growth in gross domestic product of any state in the Midwest,” Lucci wrote, “according to this week’s release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The Illinois economy grew by just 0.9 percent in 2013. Only Missouri grew slower, at a sluggish 0.8 percent.”Read more

A judge in Illinois refused to delay the corruption trial of Democrat Derrick Smith, a Chicago-area State Representative, so he could vote yes on an upcoming tax hike bill. This will hurt the Democrats’ push to make a temporary tax hike permanent.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman didn’t say that Democrat House Speaker Michael Madigan ordered the request that she delay the trial, but Madigan said that without Smith’s vote he will have trouble passing the tax hike.

Smith made the request of a delay so that he could vote for the tax hike but he also claimed that he had a “back injury” from a recent car accident. The judge said that Smith had never complained about any injuries in the several court appearances since the accident, so she found the claim unimpressive.Read more

Why is it not a surprise that the first moves to make Chicago the home of the Barack Hussein Obama Presidential Library are born in corruption? But I suppose it is a fitting way to start a library for one of the biggest failure and most corrupt politicians ever to sit in the White House.

In the most bankrupt state in the union the Illinois Democrat Party floated the idea of using $100 million in taxpayer dollars to set up the BO Library and the way they went about it all was 100 percent corruption.

Illinois Democrats are desperate to have Chicago named as the site of the Obama Presidential Library, so desperate they pulled a sneaky “off-site” vote to spend $100 million in tax dollars on its construction. But the underhanded vote and the unfunded expenditure of millions the state doesn’t have had Democrats running for cover after politicians, the media, and the voters erupted in criticism of the move.

The snap decision to throw $100 million tax dollars at a project that isn’t even assured came in for heavy criticism in a state that has one of the worst budget overruns in the country. But the way the decision was made and the many conflicts of interest involved in the campaigning for the library also raised eyebrows all across the state.

One such conflict is that the woman who heads the Illinois Arts Council Agency is the wife of the Speaker of the Illinois House, Democrat Michael Madigan. Shirley Madigan expects to have a big role in the planning and construction of an Obama Presidential Library, a project of which her politician husband is a big booster.Read more

Now, usually when a state is dissed it is dissed by people from outside the state. With the usual hometown bravado, and all, denizens of a state used to stick up for their own in the face of criticism. But a new poll finds that Illinois is so bad, even people that live there say it sucks.

America is a land of polls, for sure, but this poll is a particularly telling one. The Gallup polling firm asked residents of the 50 states (or the 57 states if you are our clueless President) what they thought about their own home states. It turns out that Montanans really love their state. But Illinois and Rhode Island? Not so much.

The top five states where residents are happy to live right where they are living are Montana (77% of residents love the place), Alaska (also 77%), Utah (70%), Wyoming (69%), and Texas (68%).

Further, if you ask everyone the general question of where the best place to live is, Texas wins, followed by Alaska then Hawaii.Read more

Eric Kohn over at Illinois Mirror has a great piece that highlights the main difference between real capitalism and the sort of crony capitalism (which isn’t capitalism at all) that the left so dearly loves.

Rich Miller is a liberal who runs a well-trafficked website on Illinois politics called Capitol Fax. While he is certainly a Democrat and fully linked into that sort of politics, his site isn’t always mere propaganda for the left–though it is filled with such. Once in a while, Miller also slams a Democrat and he has certainly reported on situations and incidents that Democrats would rather be kept quiet. So, by this I mean his site isn’t mere propaganda as once in a while he does do some actual, good, unbiased reporting, or as Rush Limbaugh calls it a “random act of journalism.”

Miller’s site is also his business. He makes a tidy living off his efforts and he deserves his success for having built a website from the ground up that has become one of the state’s biggest sources of political news. It is also notable for being a website that makes money. Thar ain’t many of them around, to be sure. So, congrats to Rich.Read more

The Illinois Tea Party (illinoisteaparty.net) held its sixth annual Chicago Tax Day Tea Party rally, but this year without the “Chicago” part as the group held their rally in the western suburbs. Specifically, the event was held in the Arcadia Theater in St. Charles where some 300 participants attended to hear candidates for office, activists, and patriotic music.

The April 15 rally targeted Obamacare and Senator Dick Durbin, of course, but mentions of the Illinois Republican Party, Sec. of Treasury candidate and establishment GOPer Tom Cross, and Senator Mark Kirk drew as many boos as the Democrats showing that grass roots conservatives have about had it with the feckless, powerless Illinois GOP.

Head of the Illinois Tea Party Denise Cattoni

Not all elected Republicans were opposed, though. One of the very first speakers introduced by Ill. Tea Party chief Denise Cattoni was State Rep. Jeanne Ives of Wheaton. Ives, while not a dynamic speaker, had a great five-minute speech written up with her key point being that she was going to be troublesome to the state Republican Party. “I will continue to be troublesome, just as troublesome as possible in Springfield,” she said warming to her theme.

State Rep. Jeanne Ives

The first speaker was State Senator Jim Oberweis, who went on first so he could get to a fundraiser.

Candidate for U.S. Senate Jim Oberweis

Oberweis is running as an admitted “underdog” to ultra left-wing Senator Dick Durbin. Obie, as his supporters affectionately dub him, noted that we need to stop the extremism in Washington and made to whip the audience up to dump Durbin by having them repeat, “Millionaire. Career politician. Dick Durbin. Must Go!”Read more

Aurora’s Democrat State Representative, Linda Chapa LaVia, decided to let her racist flag fly on the floor of the House earlier this week when she called a bi-racial Republican a”half” of a minority during a debate on her failed teachers union-backed attempt to harm Illinois’ charter schools.

Chapa LaVia was pleading with the minorities in the chamber telling them that only they really care about education in Illinois when she turned toward her right where Rep. John D. Anthony (R, Morris) was sitting whereupon she slammed him as only “half” a minority.

Of course, even by any measure of the left’s ideas of what a “minority” is ancestors wise Anthony fits the bill. He is part Africa and part Hispanic having a Puerto Rican background. He was a policeman and was elected as a Republican in 2013.

Ah, but there is Chapa LaVia’s racist clap trap coming into play, isn’t it? You see, merely being a Republican is enough for Chapa LaVia to claim that Anthony is only “half” a minority.Read more

This is the kind of crap that makes all politics seem crooked, conniving, scheming, and corrupt. With only days to go until the end of the legislative session a Democrat has sneaked in an amendment that would put a ban on farm-sold raw milk products into a bill meant to merely change the name of the state’s restroom access act.

That’s right, a ban on raw milk sales is now in a bill to provide fair access to restrooms. What do the two have to do with one another? Not a dang thing. But that is how corrupt politics works. If someone wants something stuck in an unrelated bill as a pay off, why all you have to do is set the right levers in motion.

The amendment to HB4036 would prevent the sale of non pasteurized milk products. The amendment was introduced by Chicago Representative Daniel J. Burke.

And what is this restroom bill? The only thing House Bill 4036 was introduced to do was to make a minor change to the name of the restroom act. That is all.Read more

Senator Mark Kirk (RINO, ILL) has always been a 50 percenter with the Republican Party, meaning that he only supports the party he is supposed to belong to around 50 percent of the time. But now, seemingly by his own admission, he’s become a full Democrat with his decision to fight against the GOP nominee for Senate and support the re-election of Democrat Senator Dick Durbin, the single most left-wing promulgator of lies in the U.S. Senate.

Today, Mark Kirk has just taken the penultimate step to becoming a Democrat with this decision to support Democrat Durbin over his own party’s nominee for U.S. Senate, Jim Oberweis.

Democrat Kirk, the cripple from Lake County, just said that he would rather “protect” his “relationship” with the most left-wing liar in the Senate than help a fellow Republican get elected.

“I’m going to be protecting my relationship with Dick and not launching into a partisan jihad that hurts our partnership to both pull together for Illinois,” Kirk said Monday during an event for Texas Senator John Cornyn.Read more

The U.S. Constitution says that our Second Amendment rights shall not be infringed. That’s pretty straightforward. But a middle school in Illinois has decided that shall not really means that you have no rights unless government says you are allowed to have them.

According to a workbook handout from Grant Middle School in Springfield, Illinois–that happens to be the capital city of the most corrupt state in America–Americans only have Second Amendment rights if they go and “register” with government and if government has decided they are worthy of being allowed those rights. (See image below.)

Illinois continues to rack up plaudits as one of the worst states in the entire country for every measure that makes a successful state. Bad bond ratings, among the highest for people moving away from her, worst pension messes, crummy education, etc. And now, Illinois has won the booby prize as the single worst state in the union for its unemployment track record. Yaaaa, Illinois.

At 9 percent unemployment, Illinois now has the worst unemployment rate of every state around it in the Midwest. But even worse for the Land of Sinkin’–er, I mean Land of Lincoln–the state has the worst downward trends in employment for the whole country. Illinois’ unemployment rate has gone up more times than its gone down and that is the worst record in the whole country over the last five years.

As the Illinois Policy Institute recently noted, “Illinois’ recovery from the Great Recession has been hindered by self-inflicted wounds. After the 2011 tax hikes, the Illinois jobless rate jumped from 9.4 percent to 10.2 percent. The US average declined in the same period.”
Meanwhile, in the surrounding Midwestern state, every state but Illinois has had a downward trend for unemployment by about an average of some 2 percent. And yet, Democrat controlled Illinois has seen unemployment go up and up.Read more

The folks at Champion News has the results of a new poll that shows that race for the GOP nomination for Governor has tightened a little and a new candidate has stormed into second place.

Conservative businessman Bruce Rauner is still in the lead, but his numbers have dropped to 18 percent. This is to be expected as we get closer to primary Election Day.

But the more interesting aspect of this poll is that State Senator Kirk Dillard has stormed into second place while State Treasurer Dan Rutherford, the former number two man, has fallen to the bottom of the pack.

The poll gives Rauner a big lead at 35.6 percent. But Dillard has come from last place to second with 17.25 percent of the vote. Then, taking up a perennial third place, State Senator Bill Brady garnered 12.8 percent of the vote.Read more

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-By Warner Todd Huston
In Illinois we have a complicit, left-wing media establishment that will never write a bad story about Democrats. This deal with 8th District Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth--a candi